Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [386]
46 The full extent
Historiological Note: The best summary of archival lacunae attendant to the Venezuelan crisis is in Marks, Velvet on Iron, 42–47 and notes. To Marks’s list might be added a corresponding gap in the dispatches of French Ambassador Jules Cambon at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, and another (Oct.–Dec. 1902) in the normally copious correspondence between John Hay and Assistant Secretary of State Alvey A. Adee in JH. Elsewhere, this correspondence routinely refers to burnings and deletions. See also Beale, Theodore Roosevelt, 407–8, and Edmund Morris, “ ‘A Few Pregnant Days’: Theodore Roosevelt and the Venezuelan Crisis of 1902,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, winter 1989. Gould, Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 78–79, dismisses the evidence of these sources and states flatly that TR in later life “came to believe that he had in fact delivered a warning.”
47 ROOSEVELT HAD SEEN In 1902, sixty-two million bolivars was the equivalent of twenty-five million U.S. dollars. The Washington Post, 19 Nov. 1902. For a detailed background to the Venezuela crisis of 1902, see Holger Herwig, Germany’s Vision of Empire in Venezuela (Princeton, N.J., 1986), chap. 3.
48 These powers D. M. Platt, “The Allied Coercion of Venezuela, 1902–1903: A Reassessment,” Inter-American Economic Affairs, spring 1962, notes that, contrary to traditional opinion, Germany, not Britain, was the aggressor against Venezuela throughout 1902.
49 The President sympathized TR to Cecil Spring Rice, 13 Aug. 1897, in Stephen Gwynn, ed., The Letters and Friendships of Cecil Spring Rice: A Record (Boston, 1929), vol. 1, 229–30. TR could even be said to have invited the action by stating in his First Annual Message, “We do not guarantee any [Latin American] State against punishment if it misconducts itself, providing that punishment does not take the form of the acquisition of territory by any non-American power” (TR, Works, vol. 17, 135). But as will be seen, he expected the built-in warning to be heeded to the letter. For TR the diplomatic moralist, see Marks, Velvet on Iron, chap. 3.
50 Ever the stern TR, Letters, vol. 3, 116. TR was not alone in his contempt for Castro, “that unspeakably villainous little monkey.” The Venezuela leader was reviled with near unanimity by contemporary diplomats, and modern historians have endorsed their verdict. See Herwig, Germany’s Vision of Empire, 86–87.
51 Baron von Sternburg Emil Witte, Revelations of a German Attaché: Ten Years of German-American Diplomacy (New York, 1916), 78, describes von Sternburg as “a sworn enemy of all writing.” See Stefan H. Rinke, “The German Ambassador Hermann Speck von Sternburg and Theodore Roosevelt, 1889–1908,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, winter 1991, and Rinke’s master’s thesis, “Between Success and Failure: The Diplomatic Career of Ambassador Hermann Speck von Sternburg and German-American Relations, 1903–1908” (Bowling Green State University, 1989).
52 When Roosevelt condoned TR, Works, vol. 17, 135.
53 a secret memorandum Henry C. Taylor to TR, ca. late Nov. 1902 (TRP).
54 “The first method” Ibid.; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 98; Putnam, Theodore Roosevelt, 102–11.
55 Part of him TR, Letters, vol. 3, 98, 108; Gwynn, Letters and Friendships, vol. 2, 10; Morris, “ ‘A Few Pregnant Days.’ ”
56 The adjective temporary Beale, Theodore Roosevelt, 400; Gwynn, Letters and Friendships, vol. 1, 246; Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York, 1967), 7–21; Review of Reviews, Jan. 1901; John C. G. Röhl, ed., Kaiser Wilhelm II: New Interpretations—The Corfu Papers (Cambridge, 1982), 144. TR had been hearing from Cecil Spring Rice about German colonial ambitions in Latin America since at least 1897 (see, e.g., Gwynn, Letters and Friendships, vol. 1, 227). Vice Admiral Büschel, chief German naval war planner, summarized his country’s 1902–1903 policy vis-à-vis the United States in language that requires no translation: “Feste Position in Westinden.